Feminism in Academia: An Age of Austerity?

Current Issues and Future Challenges

Friday 28th September 2012

The University of Nottingham

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Mary Eagleton (formerly Leeds Metropolitan University)

Professor Mary Evans (Gender Institute, London School of Economics and

Political Science)

The current age of austerity is posing significant challenges to feminist scholarship within academia. Recent government funding cuts to higher education are jeopardising the future of research in the arts and humanities more broadly, but the decline of centres, institutes and courses devoted to gender and women’s studies has the potential to threaten the future of feminism in the academy. Retirements and redundancies are possibly signalling the end of feminist teaching and research in certain higher education institutions. The dearth of employment opportunities for postgraduates and early career researchers has the potential to elide the next generation of feminist scholars. The increasingly competitive environment of employment in higher education is generating divisions and inequalities which put pressure upon the networks of support, co-operation and community which have been integral to feminist research, teaching and practice.

This collaborative event between the FWSA and CWWA aims to provide a multi-disciplinary forum to address such issues. In what ways are these changes affecting our work and lives? What potential is there to resist these narratives of decline? How might feminist teaching, research, theory and activism engage with and combat such challenges? Featuring a selection of keynote speakers, round table discussions and early career workshops, ‘Feminism in Academia: An Age of Austerity’ invites papers which examine ‘austerity’ in the broadest sense of the term. Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The impact of the age of austerity upon women’s and feminist writing, art, performance and scholarship.
• Theoretical perspectives and discourses on austerity in feminism, past and present.
• Teaching/researching feminism and women’s writing in the age of austerity.
• Resistance to narratives of decline in the age of austerity.
• The challenges posed to ‘sisterhood’ in the current academic environment, from postgraduate, early career research and established scholarly perspectives.
• Bridging the gap between postgraduate/early career feminist researchers and established scholars.
• Postcolonial, queer, and/or differently abled responses to the age of austerity in feminist research.
• Historical, political and sociological responses to the age of austerity in feminist research.
• Exploring alternative futures for feminism in the academy.
• Strategies of resistance to the marginalisation of feminist research.
• Feminist activism, education and the age of austerity.
• Encouraging the next generation of feminist scholars; challenges and prospects for postgraduate research.

Please send 300 word abstracts for twenty-minute papers to the event organisers Claire O’Callaghan and Helen Davies at feminismandausterityconference@gmail.com by 11th April 2012. Further information on this event can be found at: http://feminismandausterity.wordpress.com.

The FWSA Book Prize is intended to recognise scholarship which is innovative, interdisciplinary and grounded in feminist theory and practice. Sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan since its second year, the fourth round of this highly successful competition is open to scholars who were employed, postgraduate students at, or associated with a British or Irish University or research organisation between 1^st January 2009 and 31^st December 2011. Nominated books must be monographs or textbooks and published in English. We welcome single or jointly authored contributions. Edited collections and reprints of earlier editions are not eligible. Books must be first published between 1^stJanuary 2011 and 31^st December 2011; they do not have to have a UK publisher.

The deadline for the current competition is 29th February 2012.

Books may be nominated by authors or publishers, or you can nominate a book that inspired you. All entries will be judged by an external interdisciplinary panel of feminist, gender and women’s studies scholars. The winner and shortlisted entries will be featured on the FWSA website and in the FWSA newsletter. The winner will also be awarded a prize of £500.

For full details about the FWSA Book Prize 2012, including how to enter, please visitwww.fwsa.org.uk or email administrator@fwsa.org.uk.  

Women in Magazines:

Research, Representation, Production and Consumption

In November 2011, Woman’s Weekly celebrated its 100 year birthday by including a reproduction of the first issue inside the centenary edition.  A month later, US Vogue launched a digital archive containing every page published since 1892. These events remind us of the rich history which lies behind  titles that continue to grace the shelves marked ‘women’s magazines’ on both sides of the Atlantic.  Academics, especially feminist scholars, have long explored this history and the relationship between women and the journals that target them, but in recent years this interest appears to have declined. ‘Women in Magazines’ seeks to reassert the importance of magazines, in Britain and America, as a significant source for women’s and gender historians, by showcasing their latest research.

The conference is broad in scope, reflecting the interests of its supporting organisations:  the Centre for the Historical Record (Kingston University), the Centre for American, Transatlantic and Caribbean History (Brunel University), the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW), the Women’s History Network and The Women’s Library.  It will offer a platform for examining the role of women as producers, subjects and consumers of magazines; it will also explore magazines as important historical records which are being made more accessible by digital technology.  The remit is neither bound by time period nor genre: women’s relationships with specialist journals, trade magazines and non-gender specific lifestyle publications such as Ebony are of equal interest to traditional ‘women’s magazines’. The aim is to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue alongside discussion between scholars and representatives of the contemporary magazine industry. An edited collection based on papers presented is planned.

The conference will be hosted by Kingston University, London, on 22-23 June 2012. Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to womeninmagazines@gmail.com by 9 March.  Key themes for the event are consumption, lifecycles and age, race and ethnicity, social class, geography and location. Suggested topics could include, but are not limited to:

Advertising and marketing                                         Advice and education

Archives and digitization                                             Beauty and fashion

Celebrity culture                                                              Editors and journalists

Entertainment and gossip                                           Gender ideology

Methodology and literature                                         Notions of public and private

Politics and citizenship                                                Readers, reading and reception studies

Relationships and the family                                      The home

The magazine industry                                                  Work and careers

As well as thematic papers, we encourage reflections upon how we use magazines as a historic record.  We also encourage papers that look at the 19th century or earlier and particularly welcome submissions that are transnational or comparative in scope.

http://womeninmagazines.tumblr.com/

Thursday, 8 December 2011

in the  Chancellor’s Hall, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1

To obtain further information and register for the conference, contact Jane Lewin (tel:  020 7862 8966; jane.lewin@sas.ac.uk ). Please note the closing date for receipt of registrations is Wednesday, 30 November 2011.

Conference Fees

£25.00
£20.00 Reduced Rate
£15.00 Student Rate

Reduced Rate: Fully paid-up Friends of Germanic Studies or paying members of the IGRS only
Student Rate: Students with proof of status only

More details can be found here:

http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences-workshops/making-sense-symposium-for-naomi-segal.html

The deadline for the current competition is 31^st January 2012.

Books may be nominated by authors or publishers, or you can nominate a book that inspired you. All entries will be judged by an external interdisciplinary panel of feminist, gender and women’s studies scholars. The winner and shortlisted entries will be featured on the FWSA website and in the FWSA newsletter. The winner will also be awarded a prize of £500.

Nomination forms can be downloaded by clicking here.

Please email administrator@fwsa.org.uk with any queries.

Please see this article written by an FWSA member on the LSE anti-discrimination case – Jonathan has also generously offered to donate his fee to the FWSA. Thanks Jonathan!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/07/gender-studies-anti-discrimination-case

We were asked to respond to this consultation as an Association which has been involved in nominating people to the panels. Our response is below – many thanks to all the members who were involved in drafting it. Individuals are also able to respond – so if you feel strongly about this issue please visit http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/pubs/2011/03_11/consult/ to submit your comments.

The Feminist and Women’s Studies Association welcomes the attempts made in the REF 2014 draft criteria and working methods to support staff whose ability to produce outputs has been negatively affected by their circumstances. However, we believe that the provisions made for pregnancy and maternity leave are woefully inadequate. The proposal under ‘clearly defined circumstances’ specifies that the number of outputs submitted can only be reduced once 14 months of maternity leave has been taken. This does not go anywhere towards compensating for the impact of any period of maternity leave and subsequent return to work on an employee’s productivity. The alternative, to submit women who have taken maternity leave as having ‘complex circumstances’ which might justify a reduction in outputs (although this is not guaranteed), leaves too much discretion to individual institutions which may be tempted not to follow this route in order to avoid extra bureaucracy and potential problems.

Since maternity leave is awarded for a maximum of 12 months, the current proposal will only benefit women who bear two children during a REF cycle and who take more than seven months’ leave for each child. Aside from the fact that a reduction in one output is insufficient to compensate a female academic who has had two children within a short space of time (and the upper limit of 27.99 months for the reduction of just one output could even include women who had borne three), it would be patently ridiculous to expect women of childbearing age to organise their fertility in such a way that children were born within the same REF cycle. Many women who bear more than one child will take leaves within different REF cycles, and will therefore suffer a double disadvantage.

The average maternity leave is between six and nine months, which would not qualify a female academic to submit fewer outputs to the REF but which nevertheless constitutes a significant reduction in productivity, particularly taking into account the period of readjustment to returning to work and potential commitments to extended breastfeeding and/or revised working arrangements. We believe that the current proposal would push women to take shorter maternity leaves or to work during their leaves, which would be detrimental to their families and contravene their maternity rights. Alternatively, these women would effectively be expected to be more productive than their colleagues when not on leave, which constitutes a clear equalities issue.

We support the alternative proposal to reduce the number of outputs by one for each discrete period of maternity leave taken during the REF cycle. This is similar to the approach taken by the European Research Council in their Starting Grants criteria, where each child born reduces the amount of time deemed to have elapsed since the applicant’s PhD by 18 months, regardless of the actual amount of leave taken. This recognises in a much more realistic way the potential impact of becoming a mother on an academic career. We realise that this does not fully address differences between women in terms of how much leave they choose to take, and does not adequately support academic fathers: however, we believe it is far preferable to the current proposal. It is imperative for the 2014 REF to operate with an adequate model for dealing with maternity leave and motherhood, to fulfil its own commitments to equality and also to ensure that academia continues to recruit and retain the best available female talent.

http://www.thefreshoutlook.com/index.php?action=newspaper&subaction=article&toDo=show&postID=5629

Stuart Basten’s article:

http://www.thefreshoutlook.com/index.php?action=newspaper&subaction=article&toDo=show&postID=5644

It gives me great pleasure to announce this year’s essay competition results. This year’s winning essay is:

Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg ”Tension in Intersectional Agency. A theoretical discussion of the interior conflict of white, feminist activists’ intersectional location”

The shortlisted essays which together with the winning essay will be published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies are:

Emilia Aaltonen ”‘Punching Like a Girl’: Embodied Violence and Resistance in the Context of Women’s Self-defense”

Jeanne Firth ”Health Choices and Heavy Burdens: Race, Citizenship and Gender in the ‘Obesity Epidemic’”

Aristea Fotopoulou ”Intersectionality and Queer Studies as methodological frameworks for social research”

Maria do Mar Pereira ”Gender Studies is Proper Knowledge, But…: Discourses of Dismissive Recognition of Feminist Scholarship”

Naomi Griffin ”Gendered performance and performing gender in the DIY punk and hardcore music scene”

Congratulations to all winners, and to everyone who contributed to making this round such a success! The judges agreed that the quality of essays received was strong, as always, though with a few more from the Social Sciences.